When comparing foobar2000 vs PowerAMP, the Slant community recommends PowerAMP for most people. In the question“What are the best Android music player apps?”PowerAMP is ranked 1st while foobar2000 is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose PowerAMP is:

It offers a selection of themes and allows tweaking pretty much every aspect of the player UI, menus and the status bar. It even allows adjusting the zoom level of the album art among many more settings.

Pro

Functionality can be extended with components

Pro

Plugins can be used to bypass Windows mixer to output a bit-exact signal

Through the use of a plugin (of which there are three popular ones), users can get bit-exact sound output straight to their DAC or soundcard. While not something every user will use, for audiophiles this is a pretty important feature.

Pro

ReplayGain support

ReplayGain can be applied on a per album or track basis, allowing the user to set up an even volumed listening experience.

Pro

Advanced layout

The player has a layout-editing mode that allows for a wide variety of UI setups.

Pro

Variety of skins available

Foobar 2000 has powerful theming support.

Browsing a site like DeviantArt will give you hundreds of skins (that have been made by other users) to choose from.

Pro

Built-in support for Windows Media streaming

Foobar2000 can natively play ASX/MMS/RTSP streams.

Pro

MP3 player management

Users can easily send their music files to their MP3 device through the use of the right click menu when browsing their library.

Pro

Highly customisable

Pro

Transcodes all supported audio formats

The converter component allows foobar2000 to convert from and to any file formats that the player is capable of playing back.

Pro

Internal search is a beast

Foobar2000 provides an extensive search to look through your library. It supports special queries to only look for certain tags and other conditions and is incredibly fast in doing so even with over 20k of songs in your library.

Pro

Foobar works well with Windows Media Center IR remote controls with virtual mouse functions; also with wireless mini-keyboards.

Pro

Highly customizable

It offers a selection of themes and allows tweaking pretty much every aspect of the player UI, menus and the status bar. It even allows adjusting the zoom level of the album art among many more settings.

Pro

Compatible with many file types

Pro

Great equalizer effects

PowerAMP offers hands down the best software equalizer available in an Android music player. There is a noticeable difference to the sound when using lossless files and PowerAMP's equalizer when compared to any other player in the Play Store.

Pro

Bevy of features

With built n features such as sleep timer, lyric finder, tag editor, gap-less playback tweaks and options and advance features such as wakelock options, PoweAMP is one of the most user customizable music players on the Play Store.

Pro

Free 15 day trial

PowerAMP is free trial software that allows one to use the full features of the app for a limited amount of time.

Cons

Con

Not easy to skin

Out of the box it looks like something out of win2000. It is also very difficult to skin for the normal user.

Con

Cumbersome start-up

Foobar2000 requires a bit of work to get it up and running.

Con

Outdated Plugins

Many, many plugins are outdated and not maintained for years, leading to stability issues with a lof of them. A rather complex SDK and missing sufficient documentation makes maintaining or creating new plugins unnecessarily hard.Getting to that neat GUI setup you've seen somewhere is probably impossible because of that.

Con

The previous button doesn't work in random playback

You are unable to go back to a song when using random playback.

Con

Locks files and folders, making it hard to manage them

Several parts of Foobar lock files and folders in a way that they cannot be file-managed (move/copy/rename/delete) easily in the program (and externally). With the waveform plugin it's even worse. Cannot delete a file until the waveform is fully scanned.

Con

Breaks existing components every few updates

Makes it very hard to keep a customized version of Foobar running smoothly without worrying about non-working components.

Con

Provides little in terms of hand-holding

Advanced tasks such as skinning and installing components may be a bit intimidating for beginners because they require knowing your way around the computer, not just the player.

Con

Can crash right after install

Con

No DNLA compliance

A missing feature for PowerAMP is DNLA complience. So sadly that means no streaming of audio from home networks or site lockers.

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